Payment in Kind (9 page)

“You said annual retreat. So this isn’t something out of the ordinary?”

“Hardly. It’s the same old thing every year—declining enrollment, budget cuts. As head of Labor Relations, Marcia was supposed to make one of the major presentations. She liked doing it, thrived on it, in fact. Saw creating order in that kind of mess as a challenge. She had been working on her presentation all during Christmas even though Erin was home.”

“Didn’t it bother you?” Kramer asked.

“Didn’t what bother me?”

“Your wife working so late on a Sunday night, especially in such terrible weather?”

Every time Kramer opened his mouth to ask a question, there was a not-so-subtle undercurrent of sarcasm. I’m not sure if Pete Kelsey noticed it, but I sure as hell did.

“It
did
bother me, as a matter of fact,” Kelsey answered testily, “but that didn’t make any difference. I already told you, Marcia was her own woman. She did what she wanted when she wanted. She liked to ski. She was used to driving in snow. I helped her put chains on the Volvo before she left.”

Right up until then, I had felt that Kelsey’s answers had been straightforward, but this one set off a chain of alarm bells in my head. Why was he suddenly being evasive and focusing on the side issue of the weather without addressing the important part of the question? Detective Kramer noticed it too and wasn’t about to be misled.

“Why was she working?” he asked again.

A slight tremor came into Pete Kelsey’s voice. “Actually, we had a quarrel about it before she left.”

“What kind of quarrel?”

“About her going. I really didn’t want her to.”

“But you just said…”

“It wasn’t because of the weather. There was something else.”

“What?”

“It’s probably not important.”

Kramer was becoming more and more impatient. “Let us judge what’s important, Mr. Kelsey.”

As Kelsey struggled with how to respond, the atmosphere in the room became so charged with tension, it felt as though someone had flipped a switch. Whatever it was Pete Kelsey didn’t want to tell us about was something Kramer and I were both equally convinced we wanted to hear. Had to hear.

“I was just feeling…well, you know, uneasy. I wanted her to stay home. That’s all.”

“You were feeling uneasy? Why?”

“We’ve been having some strange phone calls lately,” he answered reluctantly. “Nothing all that bad, I guess, just worrisome—the kind of thing where the phone rings in the middle of the night and you pick it up and you can hear someone breathing but they won’t talk to you. And then…”

“And then what?”

“Nothing, just that whole series of harassing calls.”

“Did you report them?”

“No. Marcia didn’t want to, and they didn’t seem all that important at the time, at least not until yesterday afternoon. When Erin left to go back to Eugene. I wanted her to be ahead of the storm.”

“What happened then?”

“I was helping her load her things into the car and she happened to mention that she’d been getting calls like that too. At her apartment in Eugene. I told her flat out to change her number. To get one that’s unlisted. She was planning to do it today. Before all this…” For some time he sat silently with his chin resting cupped in his hand, staring down at the countertop.

“Go on,” I urged.

“So I tried to talk to Marcia about it, tried to talk her out of leaving the house and going anywhere, but she said it was just a weird coincidence and that I worried too much. We had words about it.” He paused for a moment before adding, “I never even kissed her good-bye.”

Detective Kramer’s pager went off right then. There are times when I hate those goddamn things. Kramer asked Kelsey if there was another phone he could use besides the one in the kitchen so he could return the call without disturbing the interview further.

Interviews are delicate things. Fragile almost, with a rhythm and life all their own. Before the pager sounded, I had sensed that we were verging on something important, but now, with the interruption, I doubted we’d ever get back to it.

Pete obligingly led Kramer away through a swinging door that opened into a large dining room. They continued on through another door-way, disappearing into the living room beyond that.

Left alone in the kitchen, I realized that now my coffee cup really was empty. I got up to fill it. The coffeepot sat on the counter next to a state-of-the-art down-draft gas stove top that was very like my own except for the fact that this one was absolutely spotless.

Pete came back. He seemed to have lost some control while he was out of the room. He walked over to the sink and stood with his face averted and his shoulders hunched, staring out the window.

“I’m glad you helped yourself to the coffee,” he said at last. “Your partner said to go on without him. He could be a while.”

With backhanded swipes at his reddened eyes, Kelsey settled back on his stool while I attempted to pick up the scattered threads of the interview. “So that’s the last you talked to your wife? When she left the house right after dinner?”

“Yes. I never saw her or talked to her after that.”

“Were you here all the rest of the night?”

The minute pause before he answered made me wonder if he was telling the truth.

“Until around ten-thirty or so,” he said. “It was getting late and she wasn’t home. I tried calling her direct line, but there was no answer, so I drove over to her office. Her car was there, but I couldn’t raise anybody, not even the security guard. I checked a couple of other places and went back by her office again around midnight. By then her car was gone from the lot and I thought maybe we had just missed each other in transit, but when I got back here, she still wasn’t home. I realized then that wherever she was, she didn’t want to be found. I went to bed. There was no point in staying up any later. I had some contracting work to do early this morning.”

“You said you noticed her car was missing from the parking lot?”

“That’s right. Marcia has…had an assigned spot, and she always parked there, even at night. It’s a good one, close to the door, and the snow wouldn’t have kept her from using it.”

A possibly devious husband and a missing car were two more things that didn’t fit with Doc Baker’s suicide theory. I asked for the make and model of Marcia Kelsey’s turbocharged Volvo. With vehicles abandoned in the snow all over the city, someone’s misplaced car could be illegally parked directly in front of Seattle P.D.“s headquarters in the Public Safety Building and it wouldn’t be discovered for days.

Kramer returned to the kitchen, announcing that a call had come in for Pete Kelsey, that Erin wanted to give him her arrival times and flight numbers. While Pete went to pick up the phone in the other room, Detective Kramer edged his way over to me.

“I’ve got some news for you,” he said under his breath. “From Doc Baker. They haven’t completed the autopsies yet, but he did have one gem for us, a preliminary finding that he thought we ought to know about.”

“What’s that?”

“The doc says we’ve got a double on our hands.”

“You mean Pete Kelsey’s right? Marcia didn’t commit suicide after all?”

Detective Kramer nodded. “That’s right. And how do you suppose he figured that out before anybody else did? You can bet it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with her being a goddamn vegetarian! It’s because he did it. He caught ‘em in the act and decided to put an end to it.”

Even though I suspected Pete Kelsey had lied to me about something, that didn’t necessarily make him a killer. “Wait just a minute here, Kramer. Did Doc Baker tell you something more about Pete Kelsey, something I ought to know?”

“Doc Baker treats me like shit. He didn’t tell me a goddamned thing, but I’m smart enough to put two and two together. That longhaired freak invites us in here and serves us homemade bread and coffee like we’re some kind of visiting royalty instead of cops investigating his wife’s murder. He admits he knows she’s been whoring around on him, but he still acts grief-stricken. What a load of crap! I’m not falling for it. Kelsey’s cool. Too damn cool, if you ask me. All we have to do is wait. He’s bound to trip himself up.”

Kramer’s absolute conviction that Kelsey was our man caught me off guard. Jumping to those kinds of conclusions so early in an investigation is bad for everyone concerned. It’s too easy to go looking for answers that will match some preset scenario, to create a set of erroneous self-fulfilling prophecies, rather than focusing on what really happened.

“Hold up a minute, Kramer,” I cautioned. “Let’s back off a little.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “I’m not backing off an inch,” he declared. “Not one goddamn inch!”

As he said the words, Kramer reached across the counter to the place where Pete Kelsey had been sitting. Without touching the handle, he picked up a teaspoon that had been lying in Kelsey’s saucer. With a single smug look at me, he placed the spoon in a glassine bag and dropped it into his pocket.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Fingerprints,” Kramer responded with a smile. “Maybe our friend Kelsey has a police record someplace and his prints are on file with AFIS. If not, we’ll happen to have a couple handy. Just in case.”

AFIS is the state of Washington’s new Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a computerized program that’s turning previously unusable fingerprints into valuable crime-solving evidence.

“That’s not entirely legal,” I pointed out.

“Neither is homicide,” Kramer returned. “If you want to squeal about it, Detective Beaumont, go right ahead. Be my guest. Meanwhile, I’m going out to start the car.”

Kramer left, taking the pilfered spoon with him, and I didn’t try to stop him.

Kramer didn’t have to convince me. Between lifting a spoon and nailing some creep who was responsible for the cold-blooded execution of two people, there was absolutely no contest.

Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

I
waited until Pete Kelsey returned to the kitchen. He paused in the doorway and gave me a long, searching look. It seemed to me that he somehow sensed that things had changed between us. He was right. They had, and not for the better.

“We’re going now,” I said, handing him one of my business cards. “Call me if anything comes up that you think I should know about.”

He nodded, but he tossed the card on the countertop in an offhand, don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you fashion. “Do you need me to show you the way out?” he asked.

“No. I’m sure I can find it.” I made my way down the stairway and through the immaculate garage. I let myself out onto the street, where Kramer was sitting in the already idling Reliant.

I looked around. The crowd of eager newsies no longer jammed the neighborhood. It was too damn cold. Either they had retreated to the warmth of their vehicles parked a block below on Boston or they had abandoned the field entirely and returned to their individual newsrooms.

“Well?” Kramer asked as soon as I climbed into the car and fastened my seat belt.

“Well what?” I returned.

“What do you think? Do you agree or not?”

“You mean have you convinced me that Pete Kelsey’s our man? No, you haven’t. It’s all conjecture, Kramer, without any supportive facts. He may have lied to us about some things, but so far I can’t see that we have a smidgen of solid evidence.”

Kramer shook his massive head. “Come off it, Beaumont. Show me your stuff. Ever since I got to Homicide, everyone’s told me about you and your terrific hunches.”

“My ”terrific hunches,“ as you call them, sure as hell aren’t telling me that Pete Kelsey is a killer.”

Kramer didn’t bother to mask his disgust. “You know what’s the matter with you? You fell for all that open marriage bullshit. That doesn’t mean the poor bastard wasn’t being led around by the balls. He was. That wife of his must have been a real piece of work, but then, so’s Kelsey.

“I think he fed us that whole line of crap just to throw us off track, to make us think he knew what she was up to the whole time. My guess is, he didn’t. I’ll lay you odds he just found out his wife was two-timing him and decided to put a stop to it once and for all. Where I come from, jealousy’s still a pretty damn good motive for murder.”

We were headed back to the department. I suppose I could have argued with Detective Kramer on the way, told him that he was being premature and lectured him about jumping to conclusions, but I didn’t. Reluctantly, and based on my own observations, I was forced to admit that there was some plausibility in what Kramer was saying.

By then, Kramer was wearing on me, getting on my nerves. I’m basically an impatient person. I always have been, and sobering up hasn’t made any difference. Through my work in the AA program, I’ve been trying to learn to accept the things I can’t change and to change the things I can.

I couldn’t change Detective Kramer, couldn’t keep him from running off at the mouth, but I could and did get out of the car. I had him drop me at the garage entrance. Bypassing the elevators, I took to the stairwells and pounded my way up to the fifth floor while Kramer parked the car.

Margie, my clerk, had two messages for me. One was from Big Al telling me not to worry, that he was much better, but that he was taking a few days of personal leave to help Molly while she finished recuperating. The other was from a lady named Kendra Meadows, who identified herself as the director of Personnel for the Seattle school district.

It was after three. With the midwinter afternoon waning fast, I figured I’d better hurry and get back to Kendra Meadows before she left her office and headed home.

As soon as she answered the phone, I could tell from the low, husky timbre of her voice that Kendra Meadows was a middle-aged black woman. She was all business.

“I have a memo here from Dr. Savage telling me that I’m supposed to render whatever assistance you may find necessary, Detective Beaumont. Phone numbers, addresses, that sort of thing. I’ll be here the rest of the afternoon if you want to stop by. My directions are to stay as late as you need me to.”

Dr. Savage had pulled out all the stops on this one. Kendra Meadows was ready and willing to help, but I didn’t yet know exactly what help we would need. Not only that, we had a mound of paperwork to tend to before we called it a day. I hedged for time.